


flashed all their sabres bare

by StripySock



Category: Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, First Kiss, Fix-It of Sorts, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:13:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28148160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StripySock/pseuds/StripySock
Summary: If I close my eyes and utilise the powers of imagination claimed to be the special purview of the artist and the fantasist alike, I can remember even now, the heavy trudge up the stairs, that Easter holiday, with the sure and certain knowledge of finding Sebastian drunk.
Relationships: Sebastian Flyte/Charles Ryder
Comments: 26
Kudos: 41
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	flashed all their sabres bare

**Author's Note:**

  * For [renaissance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/renaissance/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!
> 
> This is a canon divergence from the Easter spent at Brideshead.

Years later once again, contemplating Brideshead and all the works of Brideshead, looking at the grey bleakness, the scuff marks that have replaced the polished parquet, the pleasant gloom of unstudied antique comfort, I find myself not in the chapel, but lingering at a sideboard where a cocktail tray should be. If I close my eyes and utilise the powers of imagination claimed to be the special purview of the artist and the fantasist alike, I can remember even now, the heavy trudge up the stairs, that Easter holiday, with the sure and certain knowledge of finding Sebastian drunk.

Knocking on the door was nearest akin to the prospect of bearding my father in his study with a request. The expected result somewhat different of course - Sebastian lacked the diffident attitude with which my father undertook skirmishes. The same impotent sensation of unsurety filled me though, the sense that beneath my feet something had shifted, irrevocably changed. On the other side I could almost smell the whisky, the heavy saturated smell of it as though Sebastian had replaced vital blood with a dearer fluid, a disgusting thought if only from an aesthetic point of view. My friend pickled, a monument to his family, floating in the ether.

From inside it was no better. Sebastian was sitting at the window, no effort made to hide the glass. Was it that he lacked that certain cowardice that some called prudence? I think not. It had not occurred to him to hide. I glanced at the decanter, not fast enough for Sebastian not to notice the direction of my gaze. He pulled back his lips, as though halfway between a smile and a threat, a flash of teeth. I'd never seen a look like it on his face, for the first time perhaps he reminded me a little of Brideshead, civilisation stripped away. He was very drunk.

That bit wasn't new of course. I wouldn't go so far as to categorize Sebastian's drunkenness in some sort of ordered sanity, but it was not an alien thing, nothing strange. Just this sudden new quickness to defend himself, the surprise sullenness of the way he looked at me, as though he expected the worst. It hurt something deep inside me, a queer dull ache that throbbed along my breastbone. Not even with the hindsight of time, can I describe it exactly. I wasn't used to seeing myself cast as the enemy. This was of course years before the war, before the mirror gave me the man who was exactly that on a larger scale. 

The instinct of course was to speak what Collins would've called a piece of my mind, the same brisk phrase he'd used for my habit of picking apart the lesser mosaics that didn't meet the arbitrary standard he'd set. Embarrassed at the sight of Sebastian, unusually flushed, animal-like in his monkish cell, if their taste ran to velvet hangings and an impossibly ghastly picture of a spaniel that could have only been painted by Cordelia. The dipsomaniac in the making, Bridey would've said, nothing of the morbid satisfaction of the ghoul, which would have been preferable almost to the dispassionate forensic analysis of the spiritual surgeon in training.

Caution stopped me, the tug of that something in my chest that prevented the hottest bit of my anger forging my tongue into a razor blade. "Sebastian," I said instead. Just his name, and watched him shudder as though I'd slapped him across the cheek.

"Don't, Charles," he returned. "Don't say it like that, like I've bloody disappointed everyone and you most of all."

“Don’t speak nonsense,” only half a truth, but about as much as Sebastian could swallow back with his whisky.

“Are you here for her? Spying?” Sebastian asked. There was perhaps an inch left in his glass. An oversight possibly. The drunkard’s indifference maybe. No need to ask who he meant by she.

With the detachment of years now, I can consider Lady Marchmain, and the tremulous charm so like and yet so unlike her son, her battle so well bred, so well hidden to bridge the widening gap between the ideal of Sebastian and the reality. Perhaps scrape up a little pity in the most abstract form, even as that tendency has been beaten out of me. Love the sinner not the sin, she might have said, though I doubt that prosaic phrasing would have ever occurred to her. She had perhaps never learnt to love the sin as part of the sinner.

A little later, she would try what Sebastian called, with the resurfacing of his occasional perspicacity, the Ned manoeuvre. Had she been a man, it would have been in the history books. A gallant last defense, the charge of the light brigade in miniature. Lacking a Tennyson, the only one to recall it now is me. But that was in the future, when all else had failed, when accustomed stratagems, if they could even be called that had failed. _God save us_ , Anthony Blanche had once said, _from the do-gooding of the decent people_. Lisped out in the Mercury, it had seemed a very poor piece of wit. 

With God on her side, woven in her prayer book, stitched into the very threads of her embroidery, the very fabric of her soul, perhaps she had never considered the second, greater loss. Just learnt once again to endure.

“No,” I said, and took a step nearer to him. Away from the decanter and the door, and the reality of the drawing room downstairs with their polite appalment. Sebastian waited, fingers curled around the glass as though still he would attack me if I took it still. There’s a moment where the convulsion of the heart ceases, the storm steadies and the crack that the world has so impolitely chiseled into your chest widens enough to let something in. I can say it no better than that, the tender wrenching moment of realisation that carried me closer. I can not say if it was his anger or his fear, the way that in that moment I would have done anything, sacrificed anything to mend it.

This close, close enough to see the whiteness of his knuckles, close enough to smell the whisky on his breath, the way he looked at me as though I were the piece of the puzzle that Brideshead would turn upside down to fit into the world’s design and that Sebastian could only accept, the paths closed off, the options narrowed. If I had been before that day, the tail end of a comet, content to be dragged along in a fiery wake and to some day fall out of orbit, that moment as much as I can pinpoint it, is when that feeling ceased. If it had been to my destruction, I believe I would still have done the same. 

What had in common parlance been termed naughtiness, sin and all kinds of fascinating words, that hinted at a frisson of agreeable wrongdoing, a soupçon, no more of the essential vice, that had so occupied the thoughts of half of our acquaintances. The one which Cara had hinted in the gentlest, most delicate terms, had in fact, strange as it may seem, never been an ingredient of our days. Not from want of wanting, perhaps not even from want of knowing. Just that like in all else, I waited for Sebastian. 

To touch him, even like this, to fold my fingers around his, the glass warm under my fingers from the hold Sebastian exerted on it was a very real pleasure. To kiss, a greater one, Sebastian dropping the glass to fix his fingers around my jaw, the strength of them surprising as though he had no care for his touch, as though in my own way, I was a replacement, something else to gather up in both hands and chase away the rest of the world. 

“Come to London,” he said then, and again later, when dashed with cold water and still reaching out damp and fresh, sober now and even more inclined to kiss me, the barrier broken between us as though it never had been extant at all. The second time I was inclined to believe it, and more than inclined to agree.

I could have offered protestations perhaps. Respects to be paid to his mother by a guest. The duty owed by a son to a benevolent warden. The utterly mundane considerations of such small things as transport and the stealthier looming vision of the future. But what had passed between us rendered those things archaic, obsolete, fit only for the pages of Thirlwall. 

In London, Sebastian charmed my father, improbably. Already then I think, I had begun to realise the need for a thorough break, a break with not just the decanter and the bottle and the evening tray, but with all old scenes if a cure were to be effected. We never spoke of it of course, and Sebastian drank less, occupied himself it seemed with not just me, but London. A less charming place in spring than Oxford, and with infinitely more temptations perhaps, but new and fresh to us both, seeing it through the eyes of someone else. Kew Gardens, with riotous flora took Sebastian’s fancy, and we combed through it with the rare intentness of the inexpert but willing. 

At night at home, my father safely ensconced in his study - the beauty of Sebastian was that I never had to explain to him my father’s idiosyncrasies, he accepted them, reared as he was first on father as God and then father as absence - we made the gallery our own, reverted back to the play of our first year, the ancient merriment that seemed forever new. Not a cure, not in itself, but the first step to one.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading and have a great holiday season


End file.
